Janet Francoeur, loves to paint, work in clay, travel, garden, write, read and collect art. Her work is available at Carolina Creations and on the web at www.carolinacreations.com. Carolina Creations is an award winning gallery featuring the work of artists and craftsmen from across the country. 317 Pollock St., New Bern, NC 28560 252-633-4369.

Friday, January 29, 2010

Main Street Conference and Carolina Creations

This was a great week at Carolina Creations!

The NC Main Street Conference met in town this week and they did a walking tour which included our home and studio, a new 2nd floor apartment in the next block (right beside our gallery), the Elks building renovation, Sky Sail - beautiful new condos next to the Hilton, and the new North Carolina History Center at Tryon Palace scheduled to open this summer. We were thrilled to be in this lineup.

As an extra perk was meeting Betty Hurst from Handmade in America. She stopped into Carolina Creations to meet us. She was doing a presentation at the Main Street Conference on Creative Retail Models - this is a description of her session -Does your town need more vibrant retail? Does your downtown need more traffic to support the existing retail? Betty Hurst, director of rural entrepreneurship at HandMade in America, will present a range of creative retail models from small towns. Marshall High Studios, located on an island in downtown Marshall, N.C., Carolina Creations in Downtown New Bern and the Stars Come Out Over Bethlehem, N.H., are three of the models she will feature. If your downtown wants to increase its retail, this session can help you identify key elements essential to successful creative retail growth.

I got a chance to sit down and talk with her and tell her our story, she knew a lot of it by talking to people like Wendy Rosen, Arts Advocate from Baltimore, her group does the Buyers Market of American Craft in Philadelphia, and publishes Niche and American Style Magazines and looking at our website and reading this blog.

I was pleased that she was impressed with us!

Ten years ago the Main Street Conference was here and a room divider I made of the New Bern skyline was used on the poster for that conference.

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Jan Francoeur

In this blog I give you a behind the scenes look at my studio, my travels, new work I'm creating, what's going on in our town, and sometimes funny or poignant things I've read or encountered. I hope you'll come back often!